Much tension lies in these words. I know the evangelical church really wants to completely lean into the Grace of God. I’m in the middle of reading Romans, and by chapter 8, I was ready to throw my Bible across the room. Because with our flesh, it is impossible to comprehend. Read the book of Romans, you will feel the deep complexity of trying to understand the freedom we have in Jesus.
“My brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.” Rom. 7:4
Hm? I thought it is “for freedom that Christ has set us free!” Galatians 5:1 That we are not slaves to the law? What is this about fruit? Fruit that comes out of our live as a result of being connected with Christ. Here’s the thing about fruit. Fruit can only come from a healthy tree that is rooted in a nourishing place. The tree does no work, besides what it was created to do. To gather nourishment. When gathering nourishment properly, fruit comes. The tree only has to continue to be itself, digging deep into the earth in order to find strength and opening itself above the ground and sending out leaves to gather nourishment from the sun and air, breathing in what it can and storing energy when it needs and giving out energy when it needs.
That is the focus that you and I can learn from. Let us not be concerned with the fruit that comes out of our lives but making sure we draw nourishment that helps us be who we were created to be. Trees do not have our knowledge of good and evil, it does not get confused about what nourishes it. You don’t see tree branches holding captive little squirrels and birds, and drawing nourishment from them because they read in the latest muscle magazine that if it starts consuming more protein it will get bigger and stronger faster.
Salvation most certainly comes when we accept Christ. “because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9 This idea is reiterated throughout the new testament. May we take a moment to recognize where Paul was coming from.
Paul was a religious fanatic. He had already committed his life to the Truth and to serving God. He was raised believing that the Law is what brings salvation. Follow the law, and you can have relationship with God. The problem with the Law is that once it is there for us to know what is right and wrong, our sinful nature wants to serve itself and indulge itself and protecting itself feels good and right, making us very egocentric and obsessed with self, wanting to be perfect as God is perfect and has demanded from his people.
Paul was a slave to the law. He dedicated his life to obeying the law. He, like many of the religious rulers had the idea of what is good and evil in their own heads and so they pursued righteousness. Then Jesus came and rocked their world. Jesus came and showed that you can attempt to obey the law all day long, but if your heart is only set on looking right and good on the outside, then you are not actually following the law. Even Moses taught in Deuteronomy 6 that the whole point is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul mind and strength.” The law means nothing if there is not love. God is Love, if we can be consumed with Love, then the obedience to the law will not be a chore and it will not be the most important thing. The focus of life would be God-centric.
God observed that humankind cannot obey the law and love God and others. Even when Jesus came and showed how to love others and honor God, the religious leaders thought that Jesus was breaking the law. Jesus put love in front of law in the view of the world (the law and love are one in the same to Jesus). If you have to turn your back on a brother in order to keep the law, then you got it wrong. The point is Love. The religious leaders were very uncomfortable with Jesus’ Way, because there was no formula, the law became a little more fuzzy to our human brains, there were exceptions in the religious leaders perspective. It seemed less controllable. And a lot more uncomfortable.
Accepting Jesus, saves your live. You will no longer die. You, the real you. Your soul that Jesus made perfect. The sinful flesh will die, and your perfect soul will live on. Even with no works, we have the beautiful example of the underserving criminal that lived a criminal life maybe never loving anyone, we don’t know. But just before he dies, Jesus says that the criminal will be in paradise that very day.
The criminal did not have a chance to live a day as a Christ follower, the Grace of God brought him into the Kingdom.
Imagine a beautiful, perfectly golden wall with a doorway leading to God. Adam and Eve lived inside the doorway, the first of humanity was created to live inside the Kingdom, but God gave humanity free will. He told humans that it is best to trust in him and allow him to care for them, but God did create the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. Humans were drawn into what it would be like to get to know good and evil, it would allow us to be more like God and therefor make better decisions. After the humans ate from the knowledge of good and evil tree. It is curious, but they were not immediately expelled from the glory of being in the presence of God. In Genesis 3:22, “Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
God’s mercy overwhelms me, he did not kick Adam and Eve out of his presence to punish them, he was protecting them from eating of the Tree of life in that state of fallenness! If they had eaten of the Tree of Life in that fallen state, we would be cursed to live in our sinful nature for eternity. God did not want that for us. He simply did not want humanity to live forever with the knowledge of good and evil guiding us.
Remember, “to know” in the bible is an intimate action. Humans now knew evil deep inside, intimately. But we also know good intimately. Jesus came down to show us how to make “good” our pursuit of God, but the law was given simply to demonstrate out sinfulness and inability to live good lives, obeying the law is not a prerequisite to relationship with God. The prerequisite is to accept Jesus and follow his example.
From early on, humanity has been tasked with being master over sin. God said to Cain, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. It’s desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. “ Gen. 4:7
In other words, if we do well and listen to and follow what we know is good, we will be right with God, but if we allow sin or evil into our thoughts and actions it will rule over us. God’s advice is to rule over and be master over sin.
How many times have I allowed sin to master me? Food obsession used to be master over me. The Holy Spirit’s power has helped me overcome that addiction. I cannot say I was using will power and mastered that sin, I just prayed and recognized that I was subservient to that power and God had mercy on me and delivered me. Now I find myself being mastered by pride and vanity. This too I will pray and attempt to give over to the Lord Jesus and have mastery over it, but I know that it is not by my might nor by my power, but by His Spirit.
It is important to see and recognize sin in our lives, as we yield to our sinful nature and try to navigate what is good, we fail miserably. Pharaoh thought it was good to kill all Hebrew babies. Hitler thought it good to rid the earth of Jews. Even American Christians thought it was good to enslave other humans. Society tells us now that it is good to be able to choose one’s own gender and sexual preference. My mom grew up in a time where women did not wear pants. When I was young, women did not wear pants to church. Tattoos were bad, drinking alcohol was bad, going to the movie theater was bad. Now I do many of those things and call them good.
I’m done deciding what is good. May I give back to God, what is rightly His, the knowledge of good and evil. May I come into his loving relationship where He decides and I simple learn to yield to His leadership. Only God is good. May we all follow his ways and do everything out of motivation by our Love for Him and his creation. We cannot do this on our own. God knows this, Jesus accounted for it and they are just waiting for us to figure it out. God offers us His spirit. Christ made a way for us.
Back to the image of the beautiful wall with a doorway into the Kingdom. Humans sinned and out of Gods great love for us, he sent humans out of that perfect place where we had access to living for eternity so that we would not live eternally in this confused and broken even tormented state. He then made a way for us to understand and navigate good and evil (the Law), so we could truly understand that we are ill equipped to master sin and make ourselves right so that we can have perfect communion for eternity with our Father and Creator.
Jesus came, as the second Adam. The new version of how man can be. Adam introduced sin and took on the responsibility to navigate good and evil, Jesus came to deliver us from that responsibility. Jesus was not born into sin. His divine conception allowed for him to be born as man was supposed to be. Perfectly and beautifully dependent on the Father. As Jesus said, ““I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.” John 5:3
And again in John 8:28, “So Jesus said to them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.”
Then Jesus lived the perfect, sinless life completely yielded to God the Father, and was the beginning of a new kind of man. In a new creation with a new covenant. It is like when we choose to confess Jesus as Lord and we are baptized and join him in the suffering, we are conceived into a new covenant with God. God becomes our father, Jesus our brother. Our old man falls away and we join a new creation. We are no longer in the order of Adam, but now we occupy a space in the order of Jesus as brothers and sisters.
But it is important to confess our sins as a recognition, Psalms 66:18, “If I had not confessed the sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” (David)